vigilantly exclude customer preference arguments – such as the
student evaluations in Poskocil – that operate as a partial defense to
foreign accent discrimination and do nothing more than detract from
a sound inquiry of whether the plaintiff’s English skills are sufficient
to perform his or her job satisfactorily.
(Smith 2005: 234)Sparks v. Griffin and Edwards v. Gladewater
Independent School District
In some cases, language and accent are an issue and do stand in for a
protected category, but there is more than one kind of discrimination going
on.
The Sparks and Edwards cases both had to do with the variety of
English they spoke in the classroom, and in both cases the court focused
primarily on racial discrimination. In many pages of correspondence on
the matter of Ms. Sparks’ dismissal, the school administrator (Mr. Griffin)
commented only once on the language issue: “Mrs. Sparks has a language
problem. She cannot help the negro dialect, but it is certainly bad for the
children to be subjected to it all day” (Sparks v. Griffin 1972).
In Edwards v. Gladewater Independent School District (1978), the
discussion of language use is limited to general comments: “The
plaintiff’s contract was not renewed allegedly because of complaints
received from parents and students ... Several complaints concerned
students’ alleged inability to understand the plaintiff’s ‘Black accent.’”
If the accent issue had never been raised in Sparks or Edwards, these
Plaintiffs would still have won. This was fortunate for the courts, as it
relieved them of the trouble of dealing with questions of language, dialect
and accent and still more controversially, with the question of AAVE. In
discussing the language-focused discrimination portion of Sparks, the
court limited its comments to one short footnote: “With no disposition to
be unkind, we question, based on the spelling and composition of the two